Applying the Principles: Design in Practice
4Pages

31 Avoid houses with materials changing vertically on the elements. Avoid cluttering a house with design elements, gables and materials in an attempt to differentiate and add interest. The result has the opposite effect: Instead of making the house more interesting, it makes it complicated to build and disruptive to the streetscape. Avoid houses with gratuitous design elements. Change materials in horizontal bands throughout the house. Use proportion and details rather than additional elements to add interest. Save the budget that would otherwise be spent on complicated roof volumes and use it to build porches that engage the house with the community. Use simple volumes that are easy to frame. Use brick at the base or on the entire house, rather than in patches or vertical strips. Use Avoid Simple massing creates a coherent design that looks better on the street, and is easier to build. Complicated massing resulting in several gables adds unnecessary cost by making the house complicated to build. 30 McMansions come in all shapes and sizes. Key elements that define a McMansion and should be avoided are garages that are the most pronounced feature of the house, combinations of materials that ignore the side elevations and overscaled double-height entrances. Avoid large front-loaded garages. Homes with simple volumes, scaled for a person, work together to create a streetscape that feels like an outdoor room. Make the car a secondary resident, not the primary resident of the house. Use materials coherently around the house. Use single-story entrances, on the scale of a person. Push the garage behind the front of the house. Use Avoid double-height entrances. Avoid Keep things simple. Fewer trades on the job are more efficient and keeps things moving faster during construction, resulting in money savings. Avoid changing materials indiscriminately throughout the house, like a veneer. This will add unnecessary cost by mixing trades on site. A p p l y i n g t h e P r i n c i p l e s : t h e Mi n i -McMa n s i o n A p p l y i n g t h e P r i n c i p l e s : t h e Me g a -McMa n s i o n

33 Don’t forget the sides of the house! Avoid using brick on the front of the house only. Use it on all sides or not at all. Avoid windows without expressed lintels. Use lintels over the windows in brick homes to express the structure and, as always, don’t forget the sides of your house! Size shutters to fit the windows. Use single-height entrances. Avoid shutters too small for the windows. Avoid double-height entrances. Use Avoid Masonry on the front is a false economy, not a luxury. It only highlights that there was not enough money to put it on all sides. When using brick, use it on all...

35 Avoid using non-structural light materials such as glass walls below heavy materials such as concrete; even if the engineering is perfect, it will feel uncomfortable. Think about how the house will look in the context of a streetscape. Don’t forget the windows; think of a house not as an art project, but as a place for people to live. Use windows and openings in the house to relate the design to a human scale and make it nicer to live in. Use contemporary designs that make structural common sense and work coherently in a streetscape. Design the elements to the scale of a person. This...

37 q View of Garage: Is the house designed around the car or around the people that live in the house? q Keep It Simple: Does the house make sense to build or is it overly complicated and complex? Do numerous elements on the house add unnecessary cost? Does the house compete for attention on the street or does it contribute to the outdoor room of the streetscape? q Color and Texture: Are color and texture coherently, rather than gratuitously used on the house? Does the use of color and texture relate back to traditional uses of materials, or are they treated like wallpaper? q...